I’m always interested in what brings our guests to Eymet and everyone has a different story to tell, it’s one of many things I enjoy about our B&B. One weekend towards the end of our first season we had a couple attending a wedding, a couple meeting their new baby granddaughter for the first time, a guest who was sadly going to a funeral in the village and a couple thinking about moving the area.
As I was serving breakfast, I couldn’t help but get drawn in as people chatted. What chance had brought everyone together over coffee, pastries and eggs in our house that morning!
Buying a house is one of the recurring reasons for our guests staying with us. In fact, our very first paying guests in May ‘22 were house hunting. While here they found a house just up the road, stayed with us again when they signed their compromis de vente and again for the acte de vente and while they found their feet in the house. They now live in the village and we have become friends.
A couple staying with us this February flew over from the US to decide if they wanted to buy in the area. They had an offer accepted on a house in a nearby village while they were here. If I remember rightly, they are the 6th couple in the last 2 years to have bought or completed on a house in the area while staying with us and we have others booked in this year who are also doing just that.
Having made the move here from the UK less than 3 years ago, if people ask, I’m always willing to share our thoughts and actions leading to landing here and what we like or dislike about the towns and villages we have got to know since then. I thought about including some of the resources we used, but it is the sort of thing that can quickly go out of date and there are some great Facebook groups with hardworking admins dedicated to most aspects of the process as well as the official gouvernement.fr sites, so I’ll keep my reflections here at a much less technical level!
Before we moved to France, we narrowed the search area to ~10 possible towns / villages. On arrival, we stayed in an Airbnb while we got our bearings and started to explore. As it happens, we ended up living in Eymet (which we hadn’t heard of before arriving) running a B&B (which wasn’t on the plan) in a house which we had pretty much written off before we even came to visit it.
We looked at ~15 houses in the region of all shapes and sizes. Before arriving, we had very little feedback from the estate agents we contacted. Once here however, with a clear intention to buy and with the funds to do so, they were great (I understand this is quite common). The agent we bought through was extremely helpful right the way through and even after the process, we still catch up over a drink together sometimes.
As part of our B&B daily routine, we pop into people’s rooms to give them a refresh while they are out and about. As an ex-project manager, I was extremely impressed during one such refresh by the 2m long ‘PROs and CONs’ list of potential purchase properties that our guests had blu-tac’d to the ensuite bathroom door. I made mental note to offer our whiteboard and dry wipe pens in the future!
We are fortunate in Eymet to have 4 immobiliers in the village along with local agents from on-line agencies and other offices in the surrounding towns and villages. We are also lucky enough to have visiting employees from these immobiliers staying with us as well their clients.
If you are somewhere along the journey of thinking about / completing a house purchase in the area, as a big life changing move or as a holiday home, feel free to come and stay with us for a few days, enjoy Eymet, explore the area, pick our brains on the matter and of course see how beautiful it is here!
So we’re into April already! Since we got back home from the Canaries, we have had some great weather (as well as plenty of rain…) We’ve been able to get on with outdoor maintenance work on the house and we’re getting the pool ready for the summer. We’ve continued our weekly ‘lunch-date’ at different bars and restaurants in the region. This month’s picture was a lunch in the middle of March at Château de Fayolle just 25 minutes from here. What a great couple of hours that was… before getting back to the painting!
This is Easter weekend. Pâques in France is an important religious ceremony, but also a holiday weekend (often extended) for spending time with family. From what I have seen, chocolate and lamb play an important part in this holiday here as they did when I lived in England, but the lamb will be served with plenty of garlic and rosemary instead of the dreaded mint sauce, and the chocolate eggs will be delivered by the magic bells returning from Rome on Easter Sunday instead of by the Easter Bunny which is what I grew up with. I hadn’t noticed before, that the normally omnipresent church bells in France fall silent on Good Friday until noon on Easter Sunday when they announce the arrival of the chocolate eggs pour les petits. OK, I have vastly oversimplified and misrepresented all of that…I’ll try to write a better-informed post on the matter in the future.
Joyeuses Pâques et à très bientôt.
